Met my first goal, time to continue on my journey (pics included)

My entire life I have been overweight. Even when I was participating in sports as a child I was always heavy because I could not stop eating. I ate because I was happy. I ate because I was stressed. I ate because I was bored. In short, I just ate.

Between my freshman and sophomore years of high school I lost a lot of weight in not the most healthiest of ways and not surprisingly I put that weight back on quicker than it melted off. Over the years since this time I have tried to lose weight as I saw the scale slowly climbing north. I would exercise more, but never make changes to the way I thought and felt about food. These attempts ended up being unsuccessful and I would give up.

This past March I stepped on a scale for the first time in a year. I was 191 lbs and I almost cried. No matter how much I knew I had gained weight I never really knew. I knew I had put on weight because I went from a size 10 to a size 14. I knew I had gained weight because I could see it in the mirror, but never in my life could I imagine that I would ever get this close to weighing 200 lbs.

Something clicked in my mind. I am an academic person by nature, so I did what I do best. I researched and researched and researched some more. I read everything I could get my hands on and stumbled across MFP. I read as many forum posts as I could find and I laid out a very carefully constructed plan for myself. I began crunching numbers and even created a dynamic excel spreadsheet to keep track of my weight and other interesting statistics. I finally felt like I had a system in place that could actually work and that I could stick with.

My journey began slow. More often than not I screwed up at the beginning, but I had numbers on my side. Even if it was only by .1 lb I was losing. So I kept at it. It is now 4 months later and I have reached two mini goals this month. I have reached my halfway point and for the first time since I was 16 (6 years ago) I have managed to drop below and maintain a weight below 160 lbs.

I decided this would be a good time to post some progress pictures and share my journey (so far) with the rest of this community who have inspired me to reach my goals.

Height: 5'5
SW: 191 lb
CW: 157 lb
GW: 120-130 lb